NASCAR's drivers aren't huge fans of the Car of Tomorrow. They say it doesn't handle and it's hot as hell, too. We drive a Sprint Cup car to see what all the fuss is about.

In an effort to make me comfortable, the team initially fitted tires other than the much-maligned Goodyears that are mandated for NASCAR competition. (At unofficial tests, the teams are limited to a certain quota of Goodyears and bring other tire brands to get track time.) Various drivers, particularly Tony Stewart, have been complaining about the performance of the Goodyears all year, and the fiasco at Indianapolis in July, where the tires lasted all of 12 laps, validated that.

Helmet on, radio hooked up, the team gives the okay to fire the Toyota engine. It cracks to life, an incredibly noisy, harsh, intrusive sound that drowns the crew’s voices through the earphones. The view through the rearview mirror is partially blocked by the rear wing, so the driver-side mirror is vital for seeing what’s going on behind, along with information from the spotters and crew.

I’m not normally jittery when driving a race car, but the pressure is on here. There’s the predictable worry—will the crew think I’m a clown if I stall the car or spin it?—plus, this is a full-bore NASCAR test. All the name drivers and their teams are on hand, a shakedown before the Sonoma road race. If I muck up here, I could be on the end of a Tony Stewart knuckle sandwich. Adding more anxiety, bloody hell, it’s hot inside the car, even though its only 80 degrees or so outside. McDowell says he loses 10 pounds during a race. Sweat will be pouring profusely off this driver after just eight laps even though Juan Pablo Montoya, lounging insouciantly in the next pit garage, declares: “Naw, it’s not hot today.”

Even at relatively low speed, this is a hostile environment. Start getting near the limits, and it’s a fast, tricky beast. As you can see from our testing data, done with short-track ratios on a different, 90-degree day, it’s a rocket in a straight line, reaching 100 mph from rest in just 5.5 seconds. I was pulling close to 165 mph into the braking area for the first turn at the Virginia track, about 12 mph up on a Corvette Z06’s speed at that point. (McDowell was hitting 170 mph.) From 5000 rpm, the Toyota motor pulls loud and strong, but it really punches above 7000 revs.

Judging when and how far to press down on the throttle pedal is the real art form in these cars. It’s all too easy to light up the rear tires on corner exit, although the car actually is very controllable once the tail starts sliding. Tailing the likes of Montoya and Martin Truex Jr., it’s apparent that they bound over the curbs, so I follow suit, finding out that this behavior makes the car change direction more easily.

The handling is fairly predictable, at least on a road course, where the cars are set up to ride softer than on an oval. In the slow corners, the car pushes mightily, and I have to use the throttle judiciously to dial out the understeer, being careful not to overexcite the rear tires. Grip is solid, with peak readings of about 1.2 g, which compares favorably with high-performance street cars such as the Corvette Z06, which musters about 1.0 g. In the faster corners, it works much better, although the car’s attitude is still heavily dependent on throttle input. When the tail flicks out under power through Hog Pen, the long corner that leads onto the front straightaway, the pucker meter goes off the chart.

The weirdest aspect of the car is the steering, which is light and accurate but utterly devoid of feedback. The brake pedal, too, doesn’t give much feel, but the brakes are very effective. (The 70-to-0-mph stopping distance was long even by passenger-car standards and likely due to the slicks not getting up to racing temperature during testing.) The car doesn’t like being turned while braking, which causes it to push even more markedly. Keep too much pressure on the brake pedal as the speed bleeds away, and it’s possible to get the rear axle hopping up and down.

Although shifting without using the clutch seems odd at first, the process is easy enough. On upshifts, I just bang the lever through as fast as I can while breezing off the gas. On downshifts, a heavy blip on the throttle as the lever moves through neutral does the trick.

The car is big, heavy, powerful, and physical and, surprisingly, it’s enjoyable, akin to driving a racing car from the 1950s—only this one has more grip, more power, more weight, and less steering feel. Sure, it doesn’t exert the g-loading that a formula car does under braking and through the turns, but the noise and heat inside the cabin are brutal. To get the best out of a CoT on a road course requires finesse and violence in equal measure. ­Michael Waltrip says: “It’s a lot like wrestling in that you have to hop the curbs to get the car to turn. Yet stamping on the gas is not an option. You can’t mat it at Charlotte at 180 mph, so you can’t mat it here. You need a lot more finesse than you might think.” This Car of Tomorrow seems harder to drive than my only other previous stock-car test, in the old-style Ford Taurus.

There’s a tendency for people who aren’t fully paid-up members of the NASCAR fan club—me included—to dismiss the cars as outmoded and the drivers as, well, not as good as the people in Formula 1 or the IndyCar Series. Yet the Car of Tomorrow is in some ways more difficult to drive on a road course than a modern formula car, which has much higher limits but is also much more responsive. Dario Franchitti, who lost his Sprint Cup ride shortly after this test, says: “The hard part [with one of these cars] is not overdriving it. With an Indy car, the harder you go, the more grip you generate. This thing just doesn’t work like that.”

Then you think about driving a CoT at Charlotte, where the top drivers are dirt-tracking them into corners at 170 mph and more. It must be plenty challenging in a car that drives predictably. In something as compromised as the CoT, these drivers sure earn their money.

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*AccuPayment estimates payments under various scenarios for budgeting and informational purposes only. AccuPayment does not state credit or lease terms that are available from a creditor or lessor, and AccuPayment is not an offer or promotion of a credit or lease transaction.